Hi I'm new to the site and wondered if anyone could help me with my dead machine. It has been running fine up until recently when I added sonicstage 3.3 software. I then came to it several times to find a black screen with the message "operating system cannot be found". obviously I panicked but when I restarted it it loaded fine again. It did this a couple of times until recently when I restarted it I get the emachines logo and then a black screen with a cursor and no further progress. Pressing F8 does not make any difference nor ctrl alt del which just repeats the same process. I am really worried that I may have lost everything on my hard drive. Does anyone have any suggestions? Please help!!

The only thing I can verify in this situation is that everything on your hard drive is still there... and that this is a badly timed hardware issue, jumper setting error, or SonicStage affected your bootup (I find that strange nonetheless). I wish I could help more but there are better IT minds on here. Good luck, dood.

Hi Thanks for the help. I've taken the computer apart and everything seems to be working inside i.e. power is getting through etc. The hard drive is spinning although it is making a really high pitched sound (not that loud). I wondered, if I install a second hdd (I need the space anyway) and change it to the master drive and install xp on it, wil the system boot up on restart if the issue was related to my previous hdd. I figured if this works I could then use some recovery software to salvage what I can from my old hdd. Any advice from people with similar problems or "the knowledge would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks
Lawrence

I have decided to buy a new hdd as my old one was nearly full. I have installed it as the master and removed my old hdd. I have then used the manufacturers restore cd to reinstall windows. I am pretty sure that this cd partitioned the drive and then installed windows onto the system. However, when it prompted me to restart windows shuts down and I get the message "unmountable boot volume". I have heard this usually appears if there is no partition. All the advice on the net says to use windows recovery console which I do not have access to on the manufacturers cd. Any advice would be greatly appreciated.
thanks
lawrence

I never liked manufacturers' install discs for this reason. :\

1.) Buy a version of Windows XP Home/Pro and install onto the new drive.
2.) Download a Windows XP Home/Pro (whichever version you currently have) ISO--that's a disc image format--and simply provide the CD Key on your case, I know installation on the new drive would go over nicely. The restore discs are really just for getting old drives going again, from what I've seen.